Friday, March 25, 2005

The Seanachai with Patrick McLean

Rather than a short story, this is the website of a storyteller (that’s what a Seanachai is, an Irish storyteller). Every week Mr. McLean posts an MP3 file of a new story that runs on the order of 4 to 15 minutes. So far there have been 14 posted, and the subject matter runs from the humorously supernatural of “The Vampire In My Attic” to the criminous of “Death In B-Flat”, a PI story.

The production values are top-notch, and Mr. McLean has done this before. I felt like he was sitting next to me telling me the story rather than sitting in a studio reading from a script. He is a talented man, doing all the voices himself. At least I think he does since he doesn’t credit anyone else. Some of the voices are so different from his “normal” voice that I couldn’t swear it was him.

Mr. McLean has one serial going on called “How To Succeed In Evil,” the fourth episode of which was posted last Wednesday. The story follows a man, Edwin Windsor, who has chosen the career of a consultant. But not some mundane business consultancy, oh, no. Edwin earns his considerable fee being an Evil Efficiency Consultant. He is a business consultant to various villains and other nefarious figures.

Edwin is enormously successful at what he does, but he is not a happy man. His clients don’t listen to him. They don’t maximize their potential the way he tells them they should, and that drives him batty. Finally, in the third episode Edwin decides to quit giving advice and show the world how it is done by becoming a villain himself, or so it seems.

All of the stories are well-plotted, well-written and professionally performed, but “How To Succeed In Evil” is especially fun.

Since the stories are recorded at a sampling rate of 128 kbits/sec, the files are fairly large. If you have a dial-up connection it will take a while to download them, but the wait will be worth it.

In short, I subscribed to the RSS feed and listen to every one as they are posted.